thegamersdungeon.com is a gaming blog for PC and console gamers who are interested in several genres from rpg to strategy, adventure, and action. We focus on classic computer games but also write articles on XboxOne, Playstation4 and retro consoles such as Nes / Snes.

Thursday, 3 November 2011

(Your journey begins at peaceful city of Warunk)

Germany’s perhaps the biggest single player RPG franchise of gaming series – The Dark Eye – is getting a new sequel. Release date is speculated to be around September 2012 at the next autumn and will be released on PC and Xbox360 (meaning it’s multiplatformer). It will be using Vision Engine as it’s graphical source. Game will be published by Kalypso and is being developed by Noumena Studios. Not sure yet though how entangled to it’s roots this new The Dark Eye sequel will be since the developer seems to be different one than in previous games of the franchise. The world is over ran by demons and zombies this time. Previous titles of The Dark Eye saga include following games:

As we can see the series are not developed by same company anymore, haven’t been for a while. Original games of the series such as Arkania trilogy were known of their extremely detailed and extensively described game world. For instance character creation was very in-depth with large skill base and in every each of Arkania game you created a full party of six adventurers of your liking. While adventuring was represented in first person 3D view. The battles were represented in turn-based top-down strategic view where you were granted better control of whole party’s actions.

Below is short insight to the first level of the game:

Judging by the screenshots and video, Demonicon will be different approaching the gameplay from more modern RPG perspective leaning towards more action-roleplaying type of game instead of old true RPG of the franchise - but it might be too early to judge yet. Yet I'm not overly excited at this point for what I've seen since there are already quite much action-adventures out on the markets and making while actual in-depth RPGs are dying.

There certainly seems to be a lot of zombies though, is there Horror Survival based game element included? Kalypso released originally screen shots with only one character labeled as "main character" named Cairon - sword swinging warrior. Now on some later screenshots we see several different characters in action. At first it seemed we would only play Cairon but now it seems main character is customizable after all?Lets wait for official info about this! Will there be other character joinable to your “party of one”? We don’t know yet. It will be also interesting to see how much freedom of a choice we will get considering main characters skills and attributes. All these little pieces of information so far given out raise a lot of questions we will hopefully get answer soon in the future.

The game itself will be based on classic world of Dark Eye series:

Simon Hellwig: "By integrating the official The Dark Eye rules, Demonicon becomes a must-have title in the hearts and minds of fans of the popular RPG universe," said Simon Hellwig, Global Managing Director, Kalypso Media Group. "By combining our extremely strong video game development capabilities with a very popular and time-proven system of elegant RPG rules, we are confident that we can deliver a superb title that will thrill fans of RPG and The Dark Eye brand in equal measure."

Felix Roeken: “Having grown up playing The Dark Eye games and the pen and paper versions of this franchise, it is a true joy to be working with Kalypso Media on The Dark Eye: Demonicon, as well as its other upcoming titles,” said Felix Roeken, general manager of Trinigy. “We look forward to supporting their talented teams as they bring their extremely popular games to life, and can’t wait to start seeing the results of our partnership.”

Kalypso has revealed The Dark Eye’s main character – Cairon – who in last 25 years have been witnessing more horrors than most people endure in lifetime. He’s wearing sort of an arm armor and short sword (See the picture below).

Other art already revealed is also concept art of Heshthot – “shadowy footman of Blakharaz”. This arch-demon wields two blade-hands. (See picture below).

Also check these early The Dark Eye Demonicon in-game screenshots below (showing several different characters - a dwarf for example):